Tag: safe

Open SSH is the most widely used SSH server on Linux. Using SSH, one can connect to a remote host and gain a shell access on it in a secure manner as all traffic is encrypted.

A neat feature of open SSH is to authenticate a user using a public/private key pair to log into the remote host. By doing so, you won’t be prompted for the remote user’s password when gaining access to a protected server. Of course you have to hold the key for this to work. By using key based authentication and by disabling the standard user/password authentication, we reduce the risk of having someone gaining access to our machine/s.

So if you are not using SSH with public/private key pair, here is how to get this rolling. If you are using AWS (Amazon Web Services) you would have been forced to use this method. This is great! The instructions below will teach you a bit about this and provide insight into setting this up on your dev VM or a server which doesn’t have this level of security turned on.

By default the public key is saved in the file:~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub,
while private key is:~/.ssh/id_rsaeg.

3. Copy the generated myname_rsa.pub file to the remote host. Use SFTP and from:
/Users/name/.ssh/myname_rsa.pub drop it into remote host path:
/root/.ssh/myname_rsa.pubNote: If that folder doesn’t exist then create it.

sudo mkdir /root/.ssh/

On your Server (remote host)

Locally on your box

4. SSH into remote host and append it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys by entering: